During a recent presentation for Valve's next title, Artifact, company president and CEO Gabe Newell reiterated the Portal creator's return to the frontlines of game development, and spoke about how its time in the trenches of hardware development has changed its approach to making games.
As reported by PC Gamer, Newell suggested that Valve has always been "a bit jealous" of companies like Nintendo that have the ability to simultaneously create new software and hardware, giving them the power to reshape entire game experiences as they see fit.
"When Miyamoto is sitting down and thinking about the next version of Zelda or Mario, he's thinking what is the controller going to look like, what sort of graphics and other capabilities," explained Newell.
"He can introduce new capabilities like motion input because he controls both of those things. And he can make the hardware look as good as possible because he's designing the software at the same time. So that is something we've been jealous of, and that's something that you'll see us taking advantage of subsequently."
Newell went on to confirm that Valve currently has "several" new titles in development, presumably including Artifact itself, and the three new VR projects it unveiled last year.
It's unclear whether "several" means the studio has any more in development beyond those, but either way, it'll be interesting to see how Valve applies its newfound dev mantra going forward.